SUPER SHADE STRUCTURES AND SYSTEMS will shade and cool large areas of the built environment and other spaces -- residential villages, school and business campuses, malls, recreation parks, theme parks, data centers, prisons, and even agricultural field workers, refugee camps, reservoirs and terrestrial glaciers -- lowering outdoor as well as interior spaces, and materially reducing the need for energy-consuming mechanical cooling. This large-scale mostly built-environment intervention will be a game-changing, consequential clean cooling solution in places around the global sun belt that will make the entire 21st century Age of Heat more comfortable for People and Nature, and will materially aid humanity's need to keep global heating under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
But only if 'Super Shade' is pursued at scale, rapidly, and with the entire range of proposed structural forms and varieties that are responsive to local conditions, including geodesic, tensile, solarized, vegetated, and various hybrid structures, and with mechanical systems that are, variously, expandable/retractable or inflatable/deflatable, and even systems of floating drones-lifted and -suspended shade blankets.
Super Shade Structures and Systems will help replace global heating with global cooling by substantially reducing heat-trapping emissions from fossil-energized mechanical air conditioning while keeping large spaces shaded and cool and truncating the resultant climate destabilization. Super Shade Structures and Systems will play an outsize role in ensuring our civilization's progress and our living planet's survival!
About Ten Across
Ten Across is a special initiative of Arizona State University dedicated to fostering meaningful connections, partnerships, and collaborations that drive innovative solutions for the most pressing resilience challenges facing communities across the southern tier of the United States. Here more than any other cross section of the country, a new and critical portrait of the future can be seen, one where issues like water, energy, migration, governance, risk, extreme heat and climate are experienced in their most extreme. By integrating diverse perspectives, engaging cross-sector stakeholders, leveraging data-driven insights, and educating the future workforce, we position this region as a living laboratory for understanding and advancing innovative solutions to a rapidly changing future. More information about Ten Across at 10across.org and Arizona State University at asu.edu.